Some of My Lives by Rosamond Bernier

helping.
    Impulsively, I said, “We’ll take him home and clean him up.”

    This is how we became the temporary guardians of the highly gifted and spectacularly drunken English writer Malcolm Lowry. I had never heard of him. This was some years before he finally had his tortured semiautobiographical novel Under the Volcano published—it was to be widely admired—and long before John Huston made it even better known by his highly fantasized film treatment, with Albert Finney as the doomed dipsomaniac.
    I had had no experience whatsoever with drunks. I thought that with care, a systematic hiding of bottles—even a regimen of exercise—he would shape up. I would take him to the beach and supervise his swimming. He loved the water. He used to talk about having served on a Norwegian freighter.
    Of course I was wrong. But once sober, he was so articulate, so amusing, so totally original, that I persevered in spite of constant lapses. Because however ingenious I was in doing away with the bottles, he always outwitted me. There would be tearful promises of reform, secret slipping of pesos to the maid for more bottles, then plunges via his favorite mescal with what he called his demons.
    It was hard to piece his story together. Bits and strands would emerge, then tangle and twist. The American writer Conrad Aiken, a serious drinker himself, was a boozing father figure. Lowry mentioned Cambridge. There were constant references to sinister forces bent on trapping him. The avenging angels of fate were after him. He seemed to be on the run because of unpaid bills and overstaying his Mexican visa. He was terrified of the police and convinced he was being spied upon. He apparently had been living in Cuernavaca. What was he doing, penniless, on that bus? A wife was mentioned vaguely; she seemed to have disappeared from the scene. He alluded to his family sending him money, but evildoers took it away from him.
    He was adept at wordplay and vastly entertaining when he was not in the grip of whisky, tequila, and/or mescal. Not surprisingly, he was obsessed by the nightmare world of German Expressionist cinema. He loved American jazz, particularly Bix Beiderbecke. He said he had owned a ukulele, and said he played it very well.
    He invented a little dance to the tune of Grieg’s “Death of Aase”; we would stomp around in a circle singing, “All we need is capital, capital, capital.”

    He had DTs and would storm terrified into my room in the middle of the night. In Mexico, the cocks often make their raucous serenades at an ungodly hour instead of waiting until dawn. This would bring on further terrors, horrors. I became so aware of his fears that I started to absorb them myself.
    In the classic mold, he fell in love with his nurse. The situation became untenable. Finally, we had to send him on his way, in clean clothes, with money in his pocket, back to the Cuernavaca bus.
    A few years ago Malcolm Lowry’s biographer Gordon Bowker tracked me down in London and came to interview me. He told me about an unpublished novella by Lowry called La Mordida — The Payback —which included a fictionalized account of his time with us.
    The events he wrote about never happened. One described how he had beaten my husband in a swimming race, which very much impressed me. In fact, Lew was an expert swimmer and had taught Malcolm the crawl.
    More poignant was his tormented mea culpa of having raped me while my husband was away. Nothing of the sort ever happened.
    To quote from his La Mordida :

    Certainly he had not been able to help falling in love with Peggy. [This was a childhood family nickname, long since discarded] … The anguish of the Riley incident, and writing that poem here:

    Love which comes too late is like that black storm That breaks out of its season, when you stand Huddled yet with upturned tentative hand To the strange rain.

    What a bestial thing that had been of him to do! Drunk